I volunteer for a website, and well, basically, we don't have version control. We're working to change that, but because of several things, including the fact that I haven't worked with source control before, that's not happening for some time.
In the meantime, I'd like to move my working files into source control (probably Git) for the obvious benefits. Here's the thing: there are hundreds of thousands of files on the web server that are user-generated that I don't really want on my dev machine because, well, I pay for my own equipment (it is volunteer after all, so it's not like I can expense a new hard drive) and my dev machine is also my everyday computer and I'd rather not clog it up with a lot of stuff that doesn't need to be here.
I do, however, have an empty system sitting around that is perfectly willing to store all of that data. In all likelihood, that system is probably going to host an entire local copy of the site anyway as a backup. So, and I hope this isn't an entirely crazy idea, I'm thinking about putting the Git repository on that machine. I'm not intending to develop on that machine, however.
So,
Is putting your Git repository on a different computer than your dev machine a really bad idea? It should be technically feasible as it's on the same network, and I don't think my IDE will have any problem connecting to it, but that doesn't mean it's a terrible idea. Putting the repository on my dev machine isn't out of the question, but it'd be preferable to put it on the empty one.
(And I hope that this is related enough to keep in the same question) Because there are other people working on the site, changes are going to happen to the remote site that aren't going to go through source control. Since I'd prefer the two to stay synced, could I create a Git repository on the server, pull and merge changes into my local, and then just upload the changes through FTP? Doing any real version control on the server isn't feasible at the moment (as I said, it's being worked on), but a repository that we don't touch is a different matter. Would this be a feasible plan at all?